Branding, Business and Making Them Work (Part 7)
How to CULTIVATE a Brand
I think I might wrap it up here for now. If you have been following my series — Branding, Business, and Making them Work, by now, you understand that timeless brands are built by certain disciplines. You know how to create lasting impressions. You can differentiate, innovate, collaborate and validate. But there’s one more thing you need to know — CULTIVATE
Remember that a brand is an impression. But it’s not enough to build it, you must cultivate it.
Your organization may be an entity but like Marty fondly says, “business is not an entity, it’s a process”
A living brand is the embodiment of a behavior, a character on display. Brands are like people, whilst they may not change character, they change their clothes and hairstyles. A living brand must be cultivated.
Now that you are No 1 in your category, you have to stay in touch. The closer you are to your audience, the easier it is to cultivate your brand. Stay in touch with how people feel about your brand.
This is done internally and externally through brand audits, brand orientation, brand seminars, positioning workshops, strategy summits, creative councils, quarterly critiques, group brainstorming, teamwork training, innovation clinics, design audits, brand manuals, brand publications, brand roadshows, teamwork tools and anything you can get creative with.
To cultivate your brand, you must never switch from being human to being entity-centric.
The human side of the business, the understanding that from the design of the product or package to its deployment, you need to feel. The combination of the left and right brain is what makes the brand work. It’s easy to be an entity. The larger the organization grows, the more entity-like it becomes, but, you have to keep your humanity to build a timeless brand and… be ready to cultivate as you FEEL. It’s Brand RESPONSIVENESS
Trends change, cultures change, as a brand, you have to be human enough to understand the change and respond creatively.
I read from Daryl Travis…
Years ago, Levi Strauss (Founder of Levi’s) saw its core customers declare Levi’s Jean decidedly UNHIP. The company closed eleven U.S plants, launched a new ad campaign, and moved aggressively into e-segmentation using digitization throughout its retail system to reestablish customer relevance.
In 1994, the company initiated its Personal Pair program: Women who were willing both to pay an extra $10 to $15 over the usual price of jeans and to wait an extra week or two for delivery, could go to certain Original Levi’s Stores and have themselves “digitized”-that is, have their measurements taken and a pair of jeans custom-made, and then have the information stored in the company’s database for future purchases.
And the result? SUPERB!!!
The Personal Pair program achieved a repeat-purchase rate that was significantly higher than the 10 percent to 12 percent of Levi’s typical customers; by 1997, the program accounted for 25 percent of women’s jeans sales at Original Levi’s Stores.
Now, that’s some responsiveness.
The article quotes Sanjay Choudhuri, Levi’s director of mass customization: “The goal is not to sell a pair of jeans; it’s to build a relationship… We’re not marketing to the customer-the customer is acting as a styling consultant to us. The customer says, ‘I know your pants fit me; now let me tell you what I want the jeans to look like and how I want to look in the mirror.’ It’s getting personal. The customer is starting to design.”
Sadly they don’t do it anymore (I can’t remember why)
The more distributed a brand becomes, the stronger and more strategic its management has to be so it’s advisable to have a CBO — Chief Branding Officer. A CBO serves as a bridge between Logic and Magic so that as you build, you sustain competitive advantage
To cultivate your brand is to sustain differentiation, is to remain responsive.
Read anyone of the brand-building disciplines here. By mastering them you continuously increase the value of your brand and you command a higher ROI (Return on Impression (not investment)).
Thanks to Marty Neumeier, I like to call him ‘master storyteller’ and Daryl Travis for making such great contributions to the body of Branding Knowledge. Marty is 73 and he’s still telling stories!
I just might write about Logos, Icons, and Avatars tomorrow (it’s not a promise) but I’ll definitely cook something. I hope you read.
